The Ninth Day (2004)

The Dachau concentration camp was the first
concentration camp of the Nazi regime, and the central holding
place for imprisoned Catholic and non-Catholic Christian leaders.
In fact, the "priest block" at Dachau has been called the largest
religious community in the world, having held up to 3,000
Catholic priests, deacons, bishops, and religious, plus about 100
Protestant pastors and 30 Orthodox clergy. About a thousand died
there.

MPAA Rating

Caveat Spectator

One day in February 1942, one of these prisoners, Luxembourg
priest Jean Bernard, was unexpectedly released from Dachau and
sent home to his family. Upon arrival, though, his elation turned
to shock and grief as he learned, first, that the apparent
occasion for his release from the camp was his mother’s death,
and, second, that once he had buried her he would be required to
return to the camp.

Other than this strange reprieve, Abbé Bernard’s Dachau
internment is notable for the prison diary he kept recounting the
priests’ sufferings in the camp, from the usual (beating and
torture, starvation) to the exotic (barbed-wire crowns of thorns,
ersatz crucifixions). Volker Schlöndorff’s The Ninth
Day, a fictionalized account of Abbé Bernard’s Dachau
experiences, depicts these horrors with stark objectivity and
restraint. But it’s the brief furlough from camp that makes
The Ninth Day more than just another concentration camp
film.

Drama, like morality, turns on choices. Human suffering, as
such, can occasion horror and empathy as well as outrage at the
perpetrators, but it’s not what we passively suffer but what we
actively choose that defines us as human beings. For most
concentration camp inmates, obviously, the scope of available
choices is sharply limited, but here is an inmate who was given a
larger choice: whether to try to save himself, to flee, or to
return to the camp and prevent Nazi retaliation against his
fellow priests in Dachau.

Beyond this, during his reprieve the priest was also
apparently enticed in some way by the Luxembourg Gestapo to
capitulate to the Nazi occupiers for the sake of permanent
release. Expanding on this incident, the film imagines a series
of interviews between the physically broken priest and a young
Nazi officer over the nine days of the priest’s leave during
which he is pressured first to try to persuade his bishop to
collaborate, then to sign a statement of loyalty to the Nazis.
These interviews form the backbone of The Ninth Day’s
moral drama.

Because of this dramatic license, among others, the film’s
fictionalized protagonist has been given a different name, Henri
Kremer. Other liberties include the adoption of an incident
involving a water pipe from the memoirs of a different man,
Auschwitz prisoner Primo Levi, and the way that the protagonist’s
voice is used to engage a distinctly modern theme: the silence of
Pope Pius XII regarding Nazi atrocities.

This "silence" is something that the real Abbé Bernard
understood quite well. His prison diary documents the
consequences that accompanied each ecclesiastical protest:

The detained priests trembled every time news reached us of
some protest by a religious authority, but particularly by the
Vatican. We all had the impression that our warders made us atone
heavily for the fury these protests evoked. Whenever the way we
were treated became more brutal, the Protestant pastors among the
prisoners used to vent their indignation on the Catholic priests:
"Again your big naive Pope and those simpletons, your bishops,
are shooting their mouths off. Why don’t they get the idea once
and for all, and shut up? They play the heroes and we have to pay
the bill.’ "

The Ninth Day shows something of the Nazi responses to
ecclesiastical protests, but it also depicts the fictionalized
Abbé Kremer dealing with disappointment over Pius XII’s
relative silence. "I never doubt the Church," he tells his
bishop, "but sometimes I doubt the Holy Father."

It thus falls to the bishop to respond to Kremer’s doubts. "Do
you know what happened in the Netherlands?" he asks, and recounts
how a letter of protest from the Dutch bishops responding to
arrests of Dutch Jews led to retaliatory arrests of Catholics of
Jewish descent. "That pastoral letter sent 40,000 to their doom,"
the bishop points out. "What would be the cost of a letter from
the pope? 300,000? 400,000?"

The Ninth Day is not a rah-rah apologetic for the role
of Catholic leaders during WWII, if that would even be
appropriate. For one thing, it recognizes the difficulty and
ambiguity inherent in so complex a subject. When a smug Nazi
officer points to Vatican condemnations of Allied bombing and
even birthday greetings for Hitler, complacently remarking, "I
have no quarrel with the Vatican," it’s easy to feel that,
indeed, the pope might have taken a less diplomatically nuanced
approach. And of course collaborators and anti-Semites did exist
among the clergy.

Yet the broad-brush charge of ecclesiastical complicity has
enjoyed such wide and uncritical acceptance in mainstream culture
generally and in particular in films such as Amen. and
The Statement, that for a film to take a more nuanced
view, to depict priests and bishops opposed to and suffering
under the Nazi regime, and even to put the pope’s "silence" into
historical perspective seems almost a minor miracle.

The Ninth Day digs beyond rote charges of
ecclesiastical complicity and counter-arguments to explore
various levels of resistance and protest — and their consequences — from Abbé Kremer’s active resistance activities, to the
symbolic protests of Kremer’s bishop, who confines himself to
ringing the church bells every day and sequestering himself in
his residence so as to have nothing to do with the occupying
forces, to the "silence" of Pius XII that discourages Abbé
Kremer.

The film’s heart, though, is not in the politics of
resistance, but in the interplay between Abbé Kremer
(Ulrich Matthes, fresh from the diametrically opposite role of
Nazi propagandist Joseph Göebbels in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s
Downfall) and the Nazi officer Gebhardt (August Diehl).
Matthes, with his impossibly sunken cheeks and haunted, hollowed
eyes, and Diehl with his clean-cut Aryan good looks marred only
by a certain severity of expression, are ideally cast.

Kremer’s position in these interviews is further complicated
Gebhardt’s past as a one-time seminarian, which he uses to try to
subvert Kremer’s religious foundation with arguments about Judas
Iscariot and Jesus’ relationship to Judaism. "It was my mother’s
fondest wish that I become a priest," Gebhardt reminisces, "to
have a dignitary in the family."

Kremer’s answer: "Priests are servants, not dignitaries.
My mother knew that." Yet Kremer is too weakened, and too
powerless, to make a fit sparring partner for Gebhardt — and it’s
to his credit that he recognizes this and doesn’t even try.
Gebhardt makes a show of treating him as a guest and an equal,
but Kremer makes a point of insisting on his real status as a
prisoner. Their wary interactions, which could easily have
degenerated into mere philosophical chess matches, are saved from
doing so solely by Kremer’s refusal to play by Gebhardt’s
rules.

Instead, they become something more challenging and austere:
temptation in the original sense of the term, trial or testing.
For Kremer, even to argue with Gebhardt is to falsify the reality
of the situation between them, giving in to Gebhardt — as
evidenced by Gebhardt’s own reaction on one occasion when
Kremer’s temper does briefly get the better of him.

In exploring this dynamic, The Ninth Day dramatizes a
type of moral crisis that is often hypothetically discussed, but
seldom engaged in serious moral drama. Students of moral
philosophy often seek to clarify problematic moral issues by
positing "concentration camp scenarios," allowing extreme
disproportionate consequences to be arbitrarily attached to all
sorts of moral actions. Concentration-camp dramas, on the other
hand, typically deal with the struggle for survival or escape
rather than the possibility of moral crisis.

The Ninth Day takes the concentration-camp scenario
beyond hypothetical discussion and gives it full-blooded human
reality. Even though Kremer’s trial comes while he is technically
outside the camp, the dynamic is the same.

Another Dachau survivor, Viktor Frankl, went on to argue in
Man’s Search for Meaning that man’s most basic drive is
not for pleasure, as Freud thought, but significance, and that
men will willingly endure and even choose dreadful suffering if
they can find purpose in it. The concentration camps, Frankl
felt, showcased humanity at its worst and most depraved, but also
at its purest and most profoundly human. Few films illustrate
Frankl’s thesis as profoundly as The Ninth Day.